00:00:05 Speaker 1: There are people all up and down the Buffalo River who feel like that they have lost something, that something has been taken from them that they are never going to be able to get back. This is never going to be restored. 00:00:19 Speaker 2: In this series, we'll be examining the great American doctrine utilitarian conservation, the greatest good for the greatest number, through the lens of the formation of the Buffalo National River in the Ozarks of Arkansas, touted as our nation's first national river and celebrated without question, but will be looking at a different side of the story, one rarely told or understood, as we focus on the families who got the short end of the stick on this utilitarian doctrine and had to give up their lands, being displaced by the strong arm of the government. In this episode, we'll talk about human self interest. Take a mule ride with Willard Vlynes, meet grassroots historian Misty Langdon, and interview our longtime Bear Grease favorite historian and author and hillbilly doctor Brooks Blevins about how the heck all this happened. The water is ice cold and the story complex and windy. Hang with us for a while, because I really doubt that you're gonna want to miss this one. Where was your house from right here? 00:01:32 Speaker 3: Well? Let it for just about fifty yeards no foundation, John left? Is it? 00:01:39 Speaker 2: Yeah? 00:01:39 Speaker 3: Park till it down. 00:01:50 Speaker 2: My name is Clay Nukem, and this is the Bear Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the story of Americans who live their lives close to the land. Presented by FHF Gear, American made purpose built hunting and fishing gear as designed to be as rugged as the place as we explore. I'm in the saddle atop my trusty eight year old paint mule, Izzy, and we're following behind another, perhaps even flashier sorrel a red paint mule. Willard's mule, Rosy, is about fifteen hands tall. She's good sized. I feel like I'm following a glowing led light fifty feet below the surface of a forested sea of hickory, sweet gum, and walnut. We're completely under the shade until the mule's hoofs the water as we entered the bright sunlight crossing the river. Now, did y'all have y'all had parts of the farm on both sides of the river. Right, How did you how did you manage crossing it? Just you just didn't. 00:03:15 Speaker 3: If it was real high, couldn't. If it was real high, it couldn't. 00:03:18 Speaker 2: Get across the river. 00:03:19 Speaker 3: Yeah, we said. 00:03:22 Speaker 2: Willard the lines is seventy eight years old, born February twentieth, nineteen forty six. He and eight siblings were born down on this river, and two other siblings were born what he calls up on the mountain, all in Newton County, Arkansas. We're heading towards his old home place, but first we've got another home place to stop at. 00:03:48 Speaker 3: Grandma's maiden name was shown the line. It's nine a year to tell about in a few short lines, down in Newton County, down in Arkansham. And in nineteen one she married Grandpa. That's where. 00:04:06 Speaker 2: That's good. 00:04:08 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:04:12 Speaker 4: Grandma's maiden name was Zone Blimes. There's ninety years to tell about in a few short lines. Barn in Newton County, down in Narkansas. Then in nineteen one she married Grandpa. 00:04:30 Speaker 5: We lead her soul resting son in the morning. 00:04:35 Speaker 4: And that greadbody new she tunner barn where that barn. 00:04:39 Speaker 2: Don't get that barn is in pretty good shape. 00:04:41 Speaker 3: Yeah, we always knowed this old Harper place. Merle Haggard's grandma lived here. Her maiden name was Zone Vliines. Huh she married a heart. 00:04:53 Speaker 2: Some of y'all skin. 00:04:55 Speaker 3: Yeah. She had been my probably great great ants in the real Yeah. 00:05:00 Speaker 2: You know he's got a criminal background. 00:05:01 Speaker 3: Right, Well, I have too, in prison. 00:05:07 Speaker 2: Doing life with U Bro. That was Merle Haggard's song Grandma Harp. Her maiden name was Vlyines, just like Willard's. She was born in eighteen seventy six and died in nineteen sixty nine at the age of ninety three in Newton County. Haggard released this song in nineteen seventy two, three years after her death, and it talks about her way of life dying, Which is an odd coincidence because that year, nineteen seventy two would be significant for this river and the people who lived near it. For most, it would be a year of the celebration of a conservation success. But for the people who had land that actually touched this river, for many of them, it's a year of infamy. Here's Willard telling us about his so called criminal record. Remember we're on mules standing in front of an old barn. 00:06:12 Speaker 3: Matter of fact, I paid my first fine right here to the park rangers. Is that right? Right? 00:06:17 Speaker 2: What happened? 00:06:18 Speaker 3: There's about ten of us come in down here and camped. Now, the eight of them was preachers. Well, the next morning the park rangers come up the creek. There's some horseback riders down here. Where's all riding mules. There's some horseback riders. They made fun of her mules. They went back up still creek and told the park ranger we's camped here. And the next morning they met us down here, and you weren't a camp here, that's what he said. We slept in the old barn. He said, we wasn't supposed to. 00:06:49 Speaker 2: How that's it with you? 00:06:50 Speaker 3: Well, not very good. 00:06:52 Speaker 2: The real question is why was he making fun of your mules? 00:06:55 Speaker 3: I don't know. They just made light of her mules. 00:06:57 Speaker 2: Oh man, that gets under my skin quick. 00:07:00 Speaker 3: But I told that park ranger, I said, I want you to just look here. I said, when my folks lived here, I said, this was all clared land. I said a rabbit couldn't get through here. Now, man, I said, I'll take the blame. I said, these are other people didn't know. I asked him. I said, well, what's to find thee and he said, be twenty five dollars. He looked in his book and he said no, said he'll be fifty dollars. I said, you look in that book and find something for twenty five dollars, and he did. He charged me twenty five. That's honest. True. Of course he left. They took up a donation. I've come out of ahead and all the preachers pitched it. 00:07:41 Speaker 2: I don't want to make light of breaking the law, but this story captures something that's eluded ninety nine percent of people, including me, who've enjoyed this area, which is now public land. Many of the families who had to sell their land to the government against their will are wiel sore about the whole deal, though it took place over fifty years ago. You see today Grandma Harp's land sits in the upper portion of a ninety five thousand, seven hundred and thirty acre block of land designated as the Buffalo National River in nineteen seventy two. Advertised as America's first national River, the government acquired over ninety thousand acres of private land from over two thousand property owners, some of whose families had been in the region since this place was homesteaded. At one time, you could have driven a car in here, but since nineteen seventy two the nearest road is well over an hour's ride on a mule. The fields once cleared by Willard's kinfolks have grown up into secondary succession brambles en route in the next seventy five years to return to the Ozarks Climax forest of oak and hickory. When you ride down the river with Willard and you hear the stories of his child, childhood and what used to be his community, it's kind of spooky. It might be what it's like to visit Chernobyl in Ukraine. It's like a civilization erased off the map, engulfed by the subtle violence of natural reclamation cycles, collapsing barns and smoke houses, dilapidated homes in various stages of decay, hayfields turned into cedar groves decay in nineteen forties, model forward trucks laying around, and footprints of rock foundations of buildings are scattered all down the river. But it didn't happen because of a nuclear disaster. Or industry moving. It happened because the place was so stinking beautiful that the government decided to turn it into a national park. And trust me, you don't want to be in the government sites when they want your land. They've proven that from the perspective of a human, nature's takeover of this place seems sluggish and slow, but by how the earth measures, it's as hot, tempered, and swift as a tornado. The soil is an insatiable savage, engulfing dead organic matter. Above it houses barns and flesh, while shooting rockets of living cells to the sky. Jealous for sunlight. Anything in its path be dead gummed. Its strategy is to outlast anything in everything. The earth knows that in time it will beat you, and in some ways, so does the government. This story is about the modern American people, not just here, who sacrifice their homelands for quote, the greater good of society, slain by our utilitarian land use doctrine the greatest good for the greatest number, which we including I hold so dear. But if you've never had your land taken and your family uprooted, then it's hard to understand our national parks are celebrated in our culture, and we're proud that our nation had the idea to lead the world in preserving such places of natural beauty. But the truth is that the stories of land acquisition for the Great Smoky Mountain National Park, the Shenandoah Valley National Park, and many many others were downright brutal. The story of the Buffalo is a lesser known story. Also, much like the hundreds of thousands of acres of land taken for recreational lakes in this country between the nineteen thirties and seventies, these are not glamorous stories celebrated in our culture. But there was a time when this country was hungry for land and somebody had to fork it up. Ozark historian doctor Brooks Blevins wrote that the land acquisition process of the National Park Service when inquiring land for the Buffalo was at best confusing and at worst deceptive. Before we get into the details of how this river came to be America's first national river, I want to talk with Misty Langdon, a Newton County native whose mother was of Alliones related to Willard. But Misty's a grassroots community leader who created the Remnants project, designed to document the history of Newton County. 00:12:30 Speaker 1: People ask me all the time why I do this, because it is so much work. And Richard, I know, he pulls his hair out all the time at me because I'm I'll go down a rabbit hole and I might not come up for a day or so, and and people will call in. He says, she's looking for dead people. Just you know, let her be. But there are people all up and down the Buffalo River who feel like that they have lost something, that something has been taken from them that they are never going to be able to get back. It's never to be restored. 00:13:02 Speaker 2: It's really interesting and kind of makes my head spin backwards to hear someone talk about the Buffalo River this way, because this is a place I've only heard celebrated. But it turns out there's a lot of stories I didn't know. I first floated this river in nineteen ninety eight, and after I got married in two thousand, my wife and I spent a lot of time here. We even named our middle daughter River. I asked Misty, from the community's perspective, how all this went from private farmland back in the seventies into a national park. 00:13:38 Speaker 1: I mean, you hear rumors that something's, you know, a foot, but to actually get a notice of condemnation of your property and have no formal letter or anything before that, I think it was the shock and awe factor of how it was. 00:13:57 Speaker 2: And this would have been in the late sixties, early seventies before there was i mean, any kind of internet or the communication was just way different back then. And so you're saying some of these people on the river were just totally caught off. They are totally because it had been embroiled in like at least twenty years of murmurs of this is going to be damned, This is not going to be damned, This is going to be a wild and scenic river. This is going to be and it probably just kind of after a decade or so of that, it was just kind of like, what is going to happen? Is it ever going to happen? 00:14:31 Speaker 1: Well, it kind of goes back to that thing talking about isolated communities too, because in Fayetteville, the way that their town and everything was structured, they had all the amenities. By the sixties, the late sixties and early seventies, there were people in Boxley that didn't have phones, and some probably still didn't have along the river. I know still didn't have you know, electricity, They were running off generators. 00:14:55 Speaker 2: Fatdeville is the largest town in the region, about fifty miles from the buffer. Low Boxley is a small community at the head of the river. Interestingly, people from the Fayedville area would play a big role in having the river nationalized. Newton County was truly the backwoods of Arkansas. And I can say this because I is one that most of the people that lived here were white folks of low financial means and what the world would call hillbilly's people rich in land, love of country, family and hardship, not money, education or political power. Later we'll see where I believe the socio economic status would come into play. 00:15:42 Speaker 1: So that isolation was a real, a real hardship for them, and that was something I think tactically that the locals could not get over, was the lack of organization. I know in one of the oral histories that I had listened to, the interviewer asks the lady, did you ever sign petitions? Did you ever go to meetings? And the answer was they had signed a petition once the word had started to spread, but they never had meetings. You know, those are the type of things that we look at as a culture as being bad. You know, that's something that against your government. You don't have secret meetings. And I mean it's like, these are people who were complete patriots. They had fought in, you know, World War Two, they had a Korea, World War One, and to think about setting up a meeting to talk about your government, I mean that was And especially you think about what went through during the fifties about communism and how everybody was so nervous about being, you know, branded as a communist. I think that was just a little bit too far outside their realm of comfort. 00:16:55 Speaker 2: They weren't really comfortable using the tools of the time period RCT that would have been able to combat it. It's not like these people would have been like, oh, well, here's what we do to stop a major government action, right. 00:17:07 Speaker 1: Like a town hall or a you know or whatever. They just did not utilize that because and I'm putting words in their mouths because I don't know, but in my opinion, they didn't utilize it because that was just a step too far against their against their own government. And I think that by the time, because I spoke with one guy down in Boxley and he's about my parents' age. And I said, or how in the world did nobody get killed over this? Because I know how hot tempered I am. I'm a breed loving of the lines. That is a terrible combination. And I can't imagine in the time period that they were living, I don't know how it skirted around and somebody didn't get killed. 00:17:51 Speaker 2: Let's stop for just a second here. It's interesting that this conversation starts from the angle that this government action and to quote preserve the Buffalo is negative And if you're from this part of the country, you'd be hard pressed to hear anybody say, narry a negative word about this place. This Buffalo National River is the crown jewel of our state. But I'm learning that perspective can turn the whole narrative one hundred and eighty degrees, So being your doctrine into the hypocritical ditch, And that's what makes this story so interesting. We love public lands and national parks, but do we like how they make the sausage in the back room? Are you a fan of displacement so that our society will have a place to recreate? That's a harsh question, but it's one we asked our society and they said yes to. It's what we asked the American people before displacing the families in the Shenandoah in Great Smoking Mountains National Park. And it's the question we asked America before the Indian Removal Act of eighteen thirty. It's just interesting what as a society we're able to justify now. The Indian Removal Act was pure wickedness. Even David Crockett thought so. But the questions about national parks are much more nuanced. Landowners were paid, and some got market value for their land, and in many cases simply moved right down the road out of the park. But nonetheless, the question of heavy handed government power and property owner rights is a big one. But let's get back to the river. Willard Vilnes was born down here. We've passed Merle Haggard's grandma's place and we're riding down the rivers edged the land Willard's father used to own and farm. He's taking me to another barn. So tell me about this barn. 00:19:51 Speaker 3: Well, my dad and two brothers colder in me and mister Daniels, they built his barn and they used a handshaw to cut the rash prison. He didn't have no electric tool to talk, but he'd be a load that was born with handhol. 00:20:06 Speaker 2: What year you think of this built? 00:20:09 Speaker 3: Uh? We moved. We moved out of here in fifty six, probably probably then fifty. 00:20:17 Speaker 2: I say you remember as little kid this barn? 00:20:22 Speaker 3: Yeah I remember? Yeah, I member, Well, yeah, we would we cut hay off down in there and Dad would he would rake it and shock it and put it on the wagon. I was just about I don't know, ship seven year old shummers in there. But he let me drive the mules while they loaded the wagon. 00:20:42 Speaker 2: What's it? What's it like coming to barn like this that your dad built, that's now just like engulfed in forest and all right, it's kind of it's kind of a unique situation. 00:20:53 Speaker 3: Will Yeah, here I visited. I probably want your class here and KYI remind this a little bit. Yeah, I'm brought the kids over here and took pictures with them over here. 00:21:03 Speaker 2: And now where was your house from here? 00:21:08 Speaker 3: HiT's old trufher mitch cruching. 00:21:10 Speaker 2: Yeah, we was able to go to your old home place. 00:21:12 Speaker 3: Oh yeah, with crousty river. 00:21:13 Speaker 2: Yell, is there anything still there, no shler. 00:21:16 Speaker 3: Small custure there. Yeah, no foundation jo left of it. Yeah, park tore it down. 00:21:24 Speaker 2: The park tore down his old house. The Vilnes left in nineteen fifty six, and I assumed by seventy two the old house was in disrepair and not deemed historically significant. Some of the buildings of this civilization were left, while others destroyed. How the heck did all this come about? We're heading to Willard's home place where he was born, delivered by his grandmother. We're going to have to cross what the Ozarkians call the Buffalo kind of leaving out the US Sound in Buffalo, it's a gravel bedstream with headwaters bird in the highest elevations of the Ozark Mountains in northwest Arkansas, the Boston Range, which reaches about twenty five hundred feet. The Eurogeny of the Ozarks is the work of incomprehensible time and erosion on an uplifted plateau that was once the bed of a shallow ocean. Fossils of fish and crustaceans are common here. Geologists and psychologists agree that humans are incapable of understanding deep geologic time beyond a shallow intellectual regurgitation of huge, meaningless numbers. It's kind of like trying to explain to a grasshopper the life span of a wide oak. The beasts of the Earth only understand time and segments congruit to their lifespans. Geologists believe the Ozarks are older than the Appalachians, with origins reaching back one point six billion years, but even to the world's top geologists, things are hazy back that far. The Ozark Highlands or Mountains are in the central United States, encompassing southern Missouri, northern Arkansas, and a small portion in eastern Oklahoma and Kansas, and it roughly encompasses fifty thousand square miles. There are no natural lakes in the Ozarks. In the rugged regions, we call them mountains, and I'd challenge any outsider to come here, hike em afoot and tell me they aren't mountains. But if you want to talk about the epicenter of beauty and ruggedness the Ozarks, it's hard to deny that the Buffalo River country is its lifeblood. Starting in Newton County, the meandering River flows through Cercy and Marion Counties until it enters the White River in Baxter County one hundred and fifty three miles from its head but as the crow flies, from its headwaters to its termination is only sixty miles. The river is known for its pristine aqua blue green water towering limestone, sandstone, and dolomite bluffs some four hundred feet above the water's surface. It's known for its caves and its incredible wet weather waterfalls. A couple hundred yards off the river, uphimned in Hollow is America's largest waterfall between the Appalachians and the Rockies, which plunges two hundred and nine feet to the valley floor. However, by the calculations of men when they judge wildness based upon lack of human footprint, this river is one of America's few remaining free flowing, undamned rivers. And this is truly something worth celebrating. They're over ninety thousand dams in America, and they dang there, damned the buffalo put in all these houses, barns and bluffs underwater. Doctor Brooks Blevins is a professor at Missouri State University and a prolific author about the Ozarks. In twenty twenty two, he published a book called up south in the Ozarks. In it, he has an essay called against the Current. I want to get into the deeper history of how the Buffalo was saved from being damned and how it became a national river. Here's myself and doctor Brooks Blevins well in your interest, particularly in the Buffalo. In the essay that you wrote in your book. It's interesting. When I first contacted you, I believe you said you felt like you were the only historian that had written about this from the perspective of the people that had been displaced, and that kind of links back to your story about your grandparents, and that was a story the world was not interested in hearing of these oftentimes not that well to do, impoverish people living in these rural places getting displaced. Like that's not the story that America wanted to tell, and America wanted to hear. 00:26:27 Speaker 5: Yeah, that was not a story that was told and wouldn't be for you know, another generation. And there was no Gorilla press at that time. It was something that mostly was just just forgotten and remained forgotten. And I think, as far as I know, I am the only person on the for the Buffalo River story. I'm the only person who's ever approached it. I should say I'm the only person who's ever published anything that approaches it from the kind of the perspective of the landowners. But there's as far as the published record what the public, you know, has access to, there's very little from the perspective of the people who lost their land, the people who really made the sacrifice that the rest of us now enjoy the fruits of We. 00:27:21 Speaker 2: Mentioned a story about doctor Blevin's grandparents. It's a family story that led him to be interested in the displaced landowners on the river. Though they didn't live on the Buffalo, but rather in the White River watershed just to the northwest. I want to hear what happened to them. 00:27:39 Speaker 5: My great great grandparents lived on Pigeon Creek, which is a tributary of the North Fork of the White River, and my great great grandpa was born there just a year or two before the Civil War, and so they were still there in the early nineteen forties when the Army Corps of Engineers started building the Damn Norfolk Dam. But they were one of the families who had to sell their land to the government and they were moved. I don't know a few miles south of Mountain Home and kind of a rocky hillside down there somewhere. And I found out not too many years ago what happened. I was able to contact one of my grandpa's own cousins, as we say in the Ozarks, first cousins, and she told me the story of when the authorities, whoever the authorities were, I don't know if it was the sheriff's officer, but when they came out, you know, they'd been given the final warning that they had to vacate their farm. This was before they shut the floodgates and you know, flooded the valleys and all that kind of stuff. And she said her grandparents, my great great grandparents, refused to leave. They were in their eighties and they had lived there, you know, practically all the or adult lives, so they, you know, they didn't didn't want to go, like a lot of other landowners there, and a lot of other farmers there. She said that they refused to leave and the authorities came out and physically carried them off the premises. No, I don't know, you know, in my mind, I see two old timers planking or something. You know, there's stiff as a board that been carried out. But they may have carried them off in chairs or whatever. 00:29:26 Speaker 2: But that received no statewide press, no national press. 00:29:31 Speaker 5: No, no, it didn't. The local weekly newspaper, the Baxter Bulletin, was operated by an editor named Tom Shiris, and Shyris was one of the premier damn promoters in the state of Arkansas. 00:29:47 Speaker 2: And it's not a story he would no, No, this is. 00:29:49 Speaker 5: Not It's not a story that was likely to show up in the Baxter Bulletin. 00:29:55 Speaker 2: It's interesting the government land condemnation, whether for a lake her national park, rarely made big headlines back in the day. There's a famous photo of a pregnant woman named Lessie Jenkins being carried out of her home in a rocking chair in nineteen thirty seven when her family, including her seven children, were evicted from their home by the National Park Service to make Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. And books have been written about the process of land acquisition for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee and North Carolina, and all the stories are eerily similar. I now want to get to the deep history with doctor Blevins about the buffalo and surprisingly we're gonna have to go back to the Great Mississippi River Flood of nineteen twenty seven. But if you're a Bear Grease listener, you remember our Mississippi River series which started at episode one twenty six, and if you listen, you'll have a head start. 00:30:57 Speaker 5: To really dig into the into the heart of this matter, you have to go back even before the Great Depression, at least to the Great Mississippi River Flood of nineteen twenty seven. That was the event that really altered the trajectory of what the Army Corps of Engineers was expected to do. Before that, the Army Corps of Engineers was an organization that mainly built levees and dikes along big rivers, But the Army Corps Engineers was not a dam building agency. And because of the tremendous destruction the economic impact of that flood in nineteen twenty seven, all of a sudden, politicians had in the Mississippi Valley had tremendous pressure put on them to do something to prevent another devastating flood like this. Because you've got to remember, in the Mississippi Valley, the flood of nineteen twenty seven was basically what led us into the Great Depression, and then you get into the heart of the Great Depression, and then FDR takes office in nineteen thirty three, and you have a completely new way of looking at the way the government handles crises in a way that we've never done before, where they just try to spend your way out of it. You spend money, you put it in the hands of people who don't have it, and you expect them to turn around and spend it and try to prime the pump of the economy that way. And so it's kind of that one two punch of the nineteen twenty seven flood and the Great Depression leading into the New Deal that all of a sudden puts dams front and center on the radar for the Army Corps of Engineers. 00:32:48 Speaker 2: Dams came on the radar of America. They were all the rage. As we follow this story chronologically, it's also relevant to note that in nineteen thirty six there was a four thousand acre Buffalo River State Park formed, which was the first indication that this place was a special place for recreation. But let's get back to talking about the long periods of time that all this stuff took. 00:33:15 Speaker 5: So these flood control acts they plant the seed for these dams. Now, just because a dam is mentioned in one of these flood control acts doesn't mean it's going to get built. What they do is they authorize these dams. Then the Army Corps of Engineers has to go out finalize its plans. They have to do public hearings to gauge responses from the public, and then if they decide that the benefit cost analysis is favorable, then they go back to Congress and they present their case and they say, you know, can we have the money to build this? And so that's why it's such a long process. That's why you know, these Buffalo dams are first mentioned as early as Night teen thirty eight, but the battle for the Buffalo doesn't even heat up really till the nineteen sixties. 00:34:06 Speaker 2: So what really they talked about a dam on the Buffalo River in the nineteen thirties. 00:34:10 Speaker 5: Yeah, there's an extensive White River dam plan, a reservoir plan that's first presented in thirty eight. 00:34:21 Speaker 2: It's interesting to look back the big swings in government ideology around what the job of the government actually is and as author and bear grease guest John Barry said in his book Rising Tied, the nineteen twenty seven flood truly changed America, and oddly we'll see how it affected the Buffalo River. The Flood Control Act of nineteen thirty eight was an extensive plan to build dams that included stuff on all the tributaries of the Mighty Mississippi to hold back water during major floods. And that's right. Old Willard Vilnes Buffalo River in Arkansas was on there so decades before the National River was ever imagined. They were wanting to damn this spectacular river valley. It seems like that could have an effect on the way people handled it. With this like slow burn of kind of government bureaucracy and rumors. I mean, that's like a generation and a half of oh rumors, and finally people are just I mean it kind of just gets in their mind that well, this is going to be damned or it feels like that could play a role as opposed to just someone showing up and knocking on your door and being like we're damning the river. It's like, well, we've been hearing about this for thirty years and it's never happened. 00:35:41 Speaker 5: Yeah, that was you know there there's definitely a psychological angle to that, because I've studied a lot of the newspaper coverage and letters and things like that, not just from the Buffalo, but from other damn projects, and some of them that never got done, but that they dragged on for years and years, I mean for a generation or more. Yeah, And every every three or four years, here comes the Army Corps Engineers with another hearing. And over time, one thing that can happen is, like you say, people might just become complacent and think, well, it's it's this is never gonna happen. They're never going to build anything. Or they might just decide, well, there's nothing we can do. 00:36:25 Speaker 2: Yeah, you know that seems like yeah, or in some. 00:36:29 Speaker 5: Cases people just got madder and madder and madder, and and so you you know, you kind of this crescendo of anger at the Army Corps Engineers builds up. 00:36:40 Speaker 2: It seems like governments in the Earth have something in common. Neither are hemmed into short time spans that humans are comfortable operating in. They'll wait you out. Rumors of long term land use plans affect how people plan their lives. I want to read something from doctor Neil Compton's nineteen ninety two book Battle for the Buffalo, because it gives a picture of the times. Compton writes, the rough, mountainous country of much of the Ozarks in the Boston Mountains has failed to sustain the initial population of white settlers. The numbers of white pioneers had peaked about nineteen hundred, after which an exodus began. Between nineteen fifty and nineteen sixty. Arkansas lost two hundred and fifty thousand people in one congressman as a result. But that was not necessarily a calamity. Cutover, eroded and impoverished uplands were going back to nature. Opportunity for productive, long term civil culture and wildlife restoration existed. End of quote. The emigration that happened is beyond dispute. However, I get the sense this became part of the justification of making this land into a park, as in, people don't want to live here. People were leaving rural America to go to the cities for work. Rural communities needed help, and they said, let's build some lakes, which wasn't a bad idea and may have even been a good one, but some were destined for the raw end of this deal. The times were tough, but they didn't push everybody out, and there was a thriving community along the Buffalo River that never left. Nobody told them that times were hard, and doctor Neil Compton would be the major player in nationalizing the river. He's even known as the park's father. I'd never heard him referred to as anything but a conservation hero until I started talking to folks whose families had to sell because of the park. There'll be more about this on the next episode, but there were multiple big damn projects in northern Arkansas and all across the country. They were touted for producing the electricity, increasing tourism, and increasing real estate value, in which in most cases they delivered, and because of it, there was surprisingly little coordinated public protest until they started talking about the Buffalo. 00:39:13 Speaker 5: There's not a lot of There's not a lot of public protest against any of these dams that get built in the White River basin until you know, until you get to like Buffalo and Water Valley. 00:39:25 Speaker 2: Then why wasn't there more public protests? Because it's I read that the Buffalo was one of the corp of engineers even in d C was like, what the people are upset about this dam. They hadn't received a lot of opposition. 00:39:40 Speaker 5: Yeah, that is something that I've that I've spent a long time trying to figure out the sociology and the psychology of the timing of public protests. There were always protests from landowners who didn't want to go. But one of the things that that may be surprised in certainly upset these landowners was that they found that most of their neighbors, who didn't have land in the flood basin were usually in favor of the dams. I mean, that's that's just the way almost every almost every case, and a lot of that just has to do with human self interest. You know. It stands the reason that if you're going to lose your farm, you're going to be against this. If you're not, it's probably what's probably gonna happen. Is Land values are going to go up. You're in most cases where these dams are built, prosperity to a certain degree follows in these areas. And all the politicians are pro damned because they're money. This is port barrel politics, you know, I am, I am bringing money and lots of millions of dollars back to my district, and you're hurting just a small portion of your constituents one percent of your constituents maybe right, and all the rest of them are probably for it. 00:40:59 Speaker 2: Yeah, And that's you. 00:41:00 Speaker 5: You even see in the like in the hearings and stuff, the argument the greatest good for the greatest number. 00:41:07 Speaker 2: The great American land ethic, the utilitarian conservation of our beloved Teddy Roosevelt, the greatest good for the greatest number. It's brilliant unless you're the one that's having to pay so that others can have your stuff. And honestly, when you put it like that, it kind of sounds like communism. 00:41:28 Speaker 5: And so there's there's very little concern for that kind of insignificant minority of people who are who are going to lose their homes and going to lose their farms. 00:41:39 Speaker 2: Is that just the cost of having a prosperous nation, because that. 00:41:43 Speaker 5: Could be I mean, you know, you look at the interstate highway system. You know, you have a similar thing that happens there is especially in cities where there have been studies that show that especially low income neighborhoods, often we're just completely obliterated or part of it is, yeah, somebody, somebody's got somebody's got to make a sacrifice if you're gonna do any of this stuff. Now today, a lot a lot of people with the more environmentalist ethic and a more kind of naturalist ethic would say, well, did we even need the dams in the first place? I mean, is that that's that would be a question. But nobody was asking that question back then, because it was all about priming the pump, getting damn building jobs, and then the economic benefits that were expected to accrue from those damns being built. 00:42:38 Speaker 2: So and the hydro electric power was a big cell. I mean, that was that was like today's modern energy independence and and and maybe even renewable energy and all this like this is the way of the future. I mean, they were preaching hydro electricity. 00:42:54 Speaker 5: That's a big thing, Clay. 00:42:55 Speaker 3: That was. 00:42:57 Speaker 5: And it's it's hard for us to understand because today hydro power is just a tiny little percentage of our national power grid. But in those days, hydropower a major selling point. 00:43:11 Speaker 2: It's kind of disheartening to see how little was gained from all these dams, and to see the empty wishes of the government on energy production it has echoes of the renewable energy headlines of today. But don't take this as me knocking renewable energy. I ain't again it, but I don't trust any side short sighted energy propaganda. When all you care about is the next four years, you're bound to make bad decisions. We do well to learn from the Chinese and think of building our nation in one hundred year segments. Whoo, we are growing deep into parra greas boys. I want to step out of this conversation and get back on the river with Willard. We've crossed the river and are headed towards where he was born. He turns his mule around in the trail to face me. He wants to tell me a story. 00:44:17 Speaker 3: My two older brothers had two cousins about their age, he's teenagers. They'd meet right here every morning to walk to school together. My two cousins lived on down the creek, about half a mob. Well, they found them a yellow jacket and thesh and they got to back in each other out see which one could fight them the longest. They stripped their clothes off, naked, and they cut them a switch and they'd get in there and they'd fight them yellow jackets and see who says, see who cas standing the longest. They said that young our ball boy. He was their first cousin. They said, that youngest our ball b If you stay there long in any of them, here's a younger, but he stay longer. 00:45:03 Speaker 2: He was. 00:45:04 Speaker 3: Yeah, he's the toughest one. But now they had a lot to do, didn't it. That was their entertainment Back then. 00:45:15 Speaker 2: We ride and cross the river one more time. I see a stone structure built into the hillside. 00:45:24 Speaker 3: Yes, there's the old old fruit seller right here. 00:45:29 Speaker 2: And he describe to me what this looks like. 00:45:32 Speaker 3: Well, the fruit cellar is what the that's what you put your canned food in. It kept be cool. Our cellar stays about the same temperature about year round, with a door on it. 00:45:44 Speaker 2: Kind of dug into the hillside, probably ten or twelve feet and it's got a concrete front on it, but kind of dry laid stone around, and that just looks like a cave. 00:45:55 Speaker 3: They used it for a storm shellar too. When you become a stone. 00:45:59 Speaker 2: Where was your house from. 00:46:00 Speaker 3: Right there, well, just about fifty yellards, no foundation joll left of it. Yeah, Park tore it down. 00:46:11 Speaker 2: Willard and his family have deep roots on this river that's now public land. I want to get back to doctor Blevin's and see how the community reacted in the nineteen sixties to the prospect of damning this river. 00:46:26 Speaker 5: But part of it too is you know, if you if you're talking about why there's no public protest and I and I used the phrase public protest on purpose, because again, there's plenty of protests, just just doesn't make it to the public level. And a lot of that's because most of the newspapers, at least through the nineteen fifties were champions of damn building. This was seen as a progressive thing that any booster of a of a town or a state or anything with that, you've got to be for damn building because of the the economic impact. And if you're not, you're just stuck in the past. You know, you're just you're you're not going anywhere. 00:47:09 Speaker 2: Be like fighting a fighting a tide. 00:47:12 Speaker 5: Yeah, we don't want the internet, you know today? You know, yeah, get get it out of here. That was going on. And then in Arkansas, all to a person, all the politicians were damn advocates. 00:47:26 Speaker 2: Well, that's what's so interesting about this story, Like we're highlighting the Buffalo River. But this thing happened all over the place. Oh really, I mean nationwide and so but it's not. It's just not a story that you that you hear that much about because it's it's not. It's the unglamorous part of nation building. Stories of displacement aren't glamorous. And in the forties, fifties, and sixties damns were hot, but peaked after World War Two. The Army Corps of Engineers was the most powerful of all the Euros and had ambitions to damn every river in America. But now we'll enter the phase we'll call the Battle for the Buffalo, which at this point is primarily a fight to keep it from being damned. 00:48:15 Speaker 5: The Battle for the Buffalo really starts in the early nineteen sixties. You had an attempt in the late fifties to get money appropriated for a couple of dams. Eisenhower vetos the bill and sort of goes away until JFK takes office in sixty one. And for the most part in that era, Democrats were tended to be bigger proponents of damn building and the activities the Army Corps Engineers than Republicans and so that's when everything kind of breaks loose, is in sixty two when this Gilbert Damn proposal comes online. At the same time, in the background, you've got you got bill Fulbright, Senator from Arkansas. He's already talking to the National Park Service. They're already doing their surveys and things in the Buffalo Valley, trying to decide if this would be a valuable and worthy addition to the National Park Service. So that's all going on in the background. So you got in the late fifties, the National Park Service starts this initiative they call Mission sixty six, and nineteen sixty six is going to be the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the National Park Service. So what they're doing, they're trying to for about a decade, they're going to really really build things up and do a lot of loud, splashy things to add to the National Park Service. And part of the new stuff is lake shores and seashores and even rivers, so you've got a lot of water stuff. It's not just these massive Western parks. 00:49:51 Speaker 2: It's like a new way to think about the National park. 00:49:54 Speaker 5: Yeah, and it's not just it's not just Western stuff. And a handful of things in Appalachia. So they first do Cape Cod in the early sixties. That's the first of these modern kind of watery you know, National park things, and then they get into the river business. So that's what's happening. You've got this change of directions a little bit for the National Park Service in the late fifties and early sixties. 00:50:19 Speaker 2: Interestingly, the first person to plant the seed for the Buffalo region as national park worthy was a writer named Glenn Green in nineteen forty six who published a story about the region. But it wouldn't be until nineteen sixty one when the first money seven thousand dollars was appropriated for the National Park Service to do a survey of the river. The first drawings of this potential park included over four hundred thousand acres, but it would later be whittled down to about ninety five thousand. So now there are two stakeholders with their site set on the river, the Army Corps of Engineers who wanted a dam, and the National Park Service who wanted a park. 00:51:02 Speaker 5: So in sixty two, the Army Corps Engineers comes to Marshall and they have a public hearing and it turns into basically a pro damn public hearing. As a lot of those early Army Corps of Engineers hearings, did you know, just the boosters showed up. And so it's in sixty two when you have the creation of a local booster group. It's called the Buffalo River Improvement Association the BRIA, and they're basically just the damn boosters, is what they know. 00:51:29 Speaker 2: They're not the people, primarily, not the people who are living down there. 00:51:33 Speaker 5: They are not landowners. Probably not a one of them in the BRIA is a landowner. It's led by a local newspaper editor. And in reaction to that, you get the creation of the Ozark Society with Neil Compton, who's a medical doctor from Bentonville in far northwestern. 00:51:50 Speaker 2: Probably fifty miles from the headwaters of the Buffalo. 00:51:53 Speaker 5: And what the Ozark Society represents their canoeist and you know, just people recreation people pe who were interested in the Buffalo. And Compton was a guy who for years had been canoeing the Buffalo. So that's the Ozark Society. And then around the same time you get the Buffalo River Landowners Association, So you get a third organization in the mix. And these are the actual landowners. These are the people who own the land up and down the Buffalo River who are initially against the dam, and then ultimately they will be against the National Park Service idea as well when they realized well, either way we're you know, we're in danger of losing their lanes. 00:52:36 Speaker 2: So these to lay out the players in the field, the b ri I these people that were pro damn did known land on the river. Then the Ozark Society came in and wanted to They were anti dam, right, but their interest in the river was recreation. And then the Buffalo River Landowners Association, which would have been people that ultimately wanted no of it, right. 00:53:00 Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, if they had had a motto, it would have been leave us alone. I guess. 00:53:05 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:53:05 Speaker 5: Really, for the most part, it becomes a two person five because the Buffalo River Landowners Association they're way back there. You know, if this is a race, they're almost out of side, and. 00:53:17 Speaker 2: They don't have a big constituens. It's like picking teams for a game and you've got ten options where the other team has one hundred thousand options. I mean, right, there's only so many landowners. There's only so many people that on the county records have a deed that touches that river. Right. 00:53:34 Speaker 5: Yeah, Like I think I mentioned in that story. At one of the hearings they do in Marshall, the speaker for the Buffalo River Landowners Association is the scheduled at very last, at the very end of the hearing. By that time, most of the reporters had left, you know, they were just. They didn't have any political cloud, any political pull, and everybody knew it. The corp of Engineers knew it, The Ozark Society knew it, you know it just and they were mostly most of the landowners were ignored throughout that process. 00:54:06 Speaker 2: This idea of the landowners being ignored is really the whole point of this story, and if nothing else, our efforts here are a hat tip to them. But the truth is, I'm not sure where I would have landed if I'd been around in this time. Historical revision is really easy and deceptive and often pains a false sense of righteousness in us. The truth is that people were all over the board. There were some landowners that had just moved into the region, had no real roots here, and they weren't bothered by a damn or a park. Some folks were real estate people and they loved the idea of a dam It was a relatively small group of people who didn't want either, and in a democracy, small numbers of people get squashed, period. 00:55:02 Speaker 5: But that's you know that all starts in about sixty two is when the sides are drawn up and you really get the beginnings this battle for the Buffalo. And that's when you start getting hard feelings and between neighbors and and there's a fight that breaks out at a high school basketball game and some guys are arrested, and so you get It's also right around the same time that Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court, William Douglas comes and floats the buffalo in a very public way. 00:55:31 Speaker 2: Supreme Court Justice Douglas was anti damn, but in nineteen sixty five, the table's turn and the pro damn people gain some major steam, and it looks like the river's going to be damned until an unlikely hero arises. 00:55:48 Speaker 5: And so it's looking like sixty five might be the year when they finally get this passed. And then in late sixty five, the Governor of Arkansas, Orville Faulbus, who is much known in a Erican history for other you know, more unfortunate circumstances. He steps in and in effect saves the Buffalo from being damned. 00:56:12 Speaker 2: If you don't know the name Orville Fabas, he became the face of racism and segregation in nineteen fifty seven when, as governor of Arkansas, he ordered the National Guard to block nine African American students from entering Little Rock High School. These students became known as the Little Rock Nine and are rightfully celebrated today as heroes. However, when it comes to his natural resource policies, I think Fabas did as a solid He wrote a lengthy and eloquent letter about the natural beauty of the Buffalo River and how it was unacceptable for it to be damned, and that he supported a national park. 00:56:53 Speaker 5: You know, Fabas's letter really puts the Army Corps of Engineers back on their heels. And then John Paul Hammerschmidt takes office in sixty seven, and one of the first things that this new representative for Northwest Arkansas does is he proposes a Buffalo River National Park bill. And it takes five years for it to go through the political process and eventually be signed by Richard Nixon. 00:57:20 Speaker 2: It does March first, nineteen seventy two. Yeah, remember that we said seventy two was a year of celebration and infamy. It's all the matter of perspective, which will really explore deeply on the next episode when we talk about a lady named ev or Granny Henderson. That's some foreshadowing for you. 00:57:44 Speaker 5: It does eventually get passed. I guess from a landowner's perspective, this all happens. Really, it just flips, and you know, you go from fearing that your land is going to be drowned and you're sort of elated, I guess when you defeat that threat and then you turn around and here's, you know, here's this National park. 00:58:07 Speaker 2: It was. It's kind of portrayed as if it was either one or the other, or like the National Park is what saved it from being damned? Was that ever really true? 00:58:17 Speaker 5: You could certainly be justified in portraying the battle that way. And here's why. When the Army Corps of Engineers backed off a project, they usually didn't back off of it permanently. A permanent backoff would have to They would have. 00:58:31 Speaker 2: To actually wait till a new governor came in, or the sentiment was different politically. 00:58:36 Speaker 5: They could do that. What to to permanently get something, To get a Damn project off the books, it would have to be de authorized by Congress, and that rarely ever happened. What they would usually do is they would just just sort of put it on a back burner and say this is not a priority. 00:58:52 Speaker 2: And we know that they'll wait decades. Yeah, we know that from from even this It's not it's not. If it goes away for a year, that means nothing. Your grandchildren might have that light in their backyard. 00:59:05 Speaker 5: Yeah. And and if you follow a lot of the as I've done a lot of the newspaper coverage of these various Damn projects through time, from the from the forties into the seventies, you can go a dozen years without a Damn being mentioned in the press, and then all of a sudden, here we are, you know, ten or twelve years later, here's a new hearing on a Damn that I'd completely forgotten about. As I think it in volume three, I compared it the Army Corps Damn plans to like a monster out of a horror film. You know, you think it's gone, but it's not really, you know, it's it's it's just gonna it's gonna pop back up when you don't expect it to. And so that was the justification for the Ozark Society and yeah and the people like that was we can't trust the Army Corps engineers. They're not going to go away. So the only the only safe way to keep this river free flowing is to turn it into a national park. 01:00:05 Speaker 2: In the next episode we'll learn if that was actually true, and going back to our odd coincidence at the start. In March of nineteen seventy two, Merle Haggard also released his song Grandma Harp, which told about how her way of life had gone. The region was now under control of the National Park Service, which now had money appropriated to buy land from the private citizens who owned the ninety thousand acres that would become the park. 01:00:35 Speaker 4: We later sold the restaurant signing in Morning, and everybody knew she'd done her part. 01:00:44 Speaker 5: Don't get sucked here, no hidden let. 01:00:49 Speaker 4: Just a song about the lives Grandma heart, just to think about the times as she lived through. 01:00:59 Speaker 2: I want to get back to the river with Willard. Do you want to walk up to the old home place. 01:01:07 Speaker 3: Yeah, those smoke caps up. We can ride it forady. We get through here if you want to. 01:01:10 Speaker 2: Oh okay, Yeah, we're at the fruit cellar and we ride up the hill to the old home place. 01:01:21 Speaker 5: So this year was where is. 01:01:23 Speaker 3: Boring those smoke caps? The old house place was right back over here, just behind us. 01:01:29 Speaker 5: What did the house look like? 01:01:31 Speaker 3: It was a just a three room house. H had out of one bedroom in the kitchen and the dining room. 01:01:39 Speaker 5: Was it made of oak? 01:01:40 Speaker 3: Is made of oak? Yeah? Board? Yeall? 01:01:42 Speaker 2: Did it Did it have a rock foundation that went to the ground or did it set up like set up on rocks? No? 01:01:47 Speaker 3: He had had a rock foundation, then wood forward and wood floor was right? 01:01:52 Speaker 2: And you were you were delivered by your grandmother, Yeah. 01:01:55 Speaker 3: My grandmother Hamson. Actually you were born right here, right. 01:01:59 Speaker 2: What's it like coming back in here? You ride this stretch of river a couple times a week. 01:02:03 Speaker 3: Heah, I come in here and reminiation show people around sometime. You know, some of the free answers talk to them, y'all. 01:02:11 Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess in some ways it's better that it's like this than if it were under a lake. Somewhere. 01:02:17 Speaker 3: I've enjoyed it all my life, so yeah, I've been blessed. Yeah sure, hey, yeah. 01:02:24 Speaker 2: This is the first episode on the formation of the Buffalo National River, but this story is really about something much bigger. I'm sure many of you have family stories of people being forced from their land because of lakes, parks, or highways. The irony we wrestle with today is how seemingly happy many of us are that it happened to someone else, or at least it didn't happen in our generation. On the next episode, we'll go back in time and hear an original interview with the Buffalo Rivers first lange, who was featured in National Geographic in nineteen seventy four, Eva Barnes Henderson, or Granny Henderson as we know her, and will continue to discuss one of America's most valued public land doctrines, the greatest good for the greatest number. And let me tell you it's gonna get really personal. I'd like to take a minute and thank my friends Justin House and Kaylin Belions, both lifelong residents of Newton County who had lots of family on the river. Both helped me immensely in setting up these interviews and inspiring me with their family stories. I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Grease and Brent's This Country Life podcast. Please share our podcast with a friend this week, and I look forward to talking with all those hillbillies on the Render next week